Total cost of ownership (TCO) estimates the direct and indirect costs of a technology investment, including, but not limited to, computer software or hardware. A TCO analysis and assessment should consider the costs of purchases and continued maintenance, including the training of support personnel and system users, downtime due to a failure or outage (planned and unplanned), low performance occurrences (e.g., slow processing of data), security issues (legal and recovery costs), disaster preparedness and recovery, and infrastructure tests. TCO analysis originated with the Gartner Group in 1987. The Gartner Group, in partnership with the Consortium on School Networking (CoSN), developed a TCO tool (http://classroomtco.cosn.org/gartner_intro.html ) that allows educational technology professionals to examine the client, network, and server cost of ownership.
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